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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

An Acceptable Price To Pay

The prophesies of economic chaos being bandied about at present--by the few who seem to have noticed it's happening--remind me eerily (and wearily) of the early 1980s. Do we really have to go through that, or worse, again?

When the economy goes tits up the media reports fulsomely on bankers and executives losing their jobs. Today the newspapers are full of it. By they will be okay. Most of them will have put enough money away during the good times to see them through the bad times in a comfort comparable to what they've already enjoyed.

It's the lives of ordinary people that are wrecked. Their dreams taken away from them. Their one chance of living the storybook life they wanted stolen by circumstances they have no control over. The privation and degradation they are set to experience in the next couple of years will mark them forever.

Ask anybody who lived through the 80s at the rough end of Thatcher's economic miracle why they hate the Conservatives so passionately and believe the System is inherently poisonous, and you will see how deep the scars of the times we're facing once again can run.

And we hear that the coming recession (if it isn't a full-blown Depression) has been at least partly brought about by the unrestrained greed of the children of the Thatcher/ Reagan revolution speculating on deals that never had a chance of working to take their fat bonuses and run to the Hills.

I wonder if this time Society will learn. I wonder, and I think not, since this is what happens in Capitalism and the people who sit at the top of the pile seem to think the decimation of every second or third generation is an acceptable price to pay for their monstrous profits.

2 comments:

You're looking at one, although born and grew up on distant shores, nonetheless experienced what my family experienced.

Poverty. Scraping enough together to make sure there was something edible for dinner.

Decades have passed, we're still much the same, although our income has grown, but still aware that it could all fall apart at any given moment. So I take offence to that Bruce, we're not all greedy. We have bided our time waiting for the collapse, and we will survive, as we survived before. Even if I can't afford cigarettes or milk, I can still afford to make damper and broth and keep a roof over my head. If it's one thing Thatcher taught us, it was to survive on the brink.

By the phrase "children of the Revolution" I meant all the young capitalist bankers and speculators on Wall Street and in the City, people who've swallowed the Thatcherite/ Reaganite philosophy and even now, when it's all coming down around their ears, still believe the free market is the only market.